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“This is actually a situation in which real people that we care about are being exploited.”Īgriculture workers lack many of the legal protections of other industries, like the right to collective bargaining and pay regulations. Pam Marsh, chair of a bipartisan task force addressing issues related to illegal weed production. “This is not just a theoretical problem, with neighborhoods that nobody’s ever seen before, complaining about unsavory characters,” said Oregon state Rep. Its cause is clear: As long as there are Americans purchasing unlicensed marijuana, that crop will be grown somewhere - and often, it will be grown by workers like Isabella, Leticia and Maria. At least 3.2 million pounds of that will be produced in Oregon, and 19.1 million in California - mostly along the expansive border region between Eugene and Sacramento. A 2022 report by Whitney Economics estimates that 34.4 million pounds of illegal cannabis products - from flower to vapes and edibles - will be sold in the U.S. Nineteen states have legalized recreational marijuana since 2012, but the illicit market in the U.S. And yet, “no one is talking about labor and cannabis.” “All the ingredients are there for major abuse,” said Jamie Padilla, a former United Farm Workers organizer who worked with men and women like Isabella and her family. Undocumented workers on such farms face unsanitary working conditions, exposure to illegal pesticides and chemicals, rampant wage theft and the threat of violence. The murky legal environment has made this region and others, in states such as Oklahoma and California, magnets for human labor trafficking. Instead, it’s thriving in places like southern Oregon, where illegal weed farms are camouflaged beside their legal counterparts - and then ship their unregulated and untested marijuana to states as far away as New York and Florida.

Legalization was supposed to squelch the illicit marijuana market. labor law: undocumented agricultural workers at an off-the-books worksite in an illegal industry. The women exist in one of the deepest cracks in U.S. If you buy marijuana illegally somewhere in the U.S., there is a very good chance that it was grown by people like Isabella, Maria and Leticia. “We were worse than prisoners,” Isabella said. (POLITICO is using their first names only to protect their identities.) As for the cartels that ran the grow operations, the women believed they’d exact revenge on their relatives back in Mexico. citizen, but Leticia and Isabella are undocumented workers. If they spoke to the police, she worried that “maybe it’s bad to be working on it they get to lock me up.” Maria is a U.S. They never sought help because they were afraid, Leticia said. Once the women showed up to the new farm, she disappeared. As with the other weed farms, they learned about the job from a woman they refer to as a contratista, who raved about the pay and assured them that the farm was licensed and produced federally legal hemp, not marijuana. The Q Bar X Ranch was at least the ninth farm the women had worked at - and the second where they said they were held prisoner by men with rifles, forbidden from leaving even to go to the grocery store or seek medical help. “I slept with one eye open and one eye closed.” The men working alongside them menaced them with sexually aggressive remarks - and getting paid the wages they hoped to send back to family in Michoacán, Mexico was the exception, not the rule.

There was often no electricity or potable water.

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The women slept in tents, washed their dishes with hoses, used overflowing portable toilets and ate mostly rice cooked under tarps. In a July interview with POLITICO, the two women and Isabella’s 30-year-old daughter, Maria described a nearly two-year-long ordeal of itinerant labor on marijuana farms throughout southern Oregon.

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